The two scenes were a week apart and six hundred miles apart, and they were laid out the same way: a woman strangled with a ligature in a cheap hotel or motel room, sexually assaulted and beaten, with a pillowcase over her face.
Ida Mae Bladen, thirty, was found in room 409 of the Dennison Hotel on Vine Street in downtown Cincinnati on Friday, September 27, 1991, a lamp cord around her neck. She lived in Over-the-Rhine and worked the streets. The man who had checked into the room gave a Texas address and said he had arrived the day before. Staff described him as in his thirties, thin, about five feet seven and 150 to 160 pounds.
Exactly a week later, on October 4, Donna N. Bacot was found in room 23 of the Esquire Motel, 2706 Dickerson Road in Nashville, naked, a piece of towel knotted around her neck, a pillowcase over her face, and the whole room soaked with water. The room had been rented by a man from Texas calling himself Terry Campbell. She had met him the day before at B.J.'s Country Lounge, two doors down at 2704 Dickerson Road, where her sister Vicky was working. He bought her a beer and played several games of pool with her. Later he came to the house where she was babysitting her sister's children, and at about four in the morning she went with him to the motel. The manager knocked hours later, an hour after checkout time, to ask whether the guest would be staying another night, and opened the door when nobody answered.
Her age is given as twenty-six in the Tennessean's report at the time of the arrest and as twenty-four in later accounts working from a birth year of 1967.
Michael Scott Magliolo was born on July 8, 1960. He was not a trucker. He worked as a McDonald's manager in Jasper, Texas, and on his days off he hitched rides with long-haul drivers, working as a thumper, loading and unloading, and he killed in the places the trucks took him. He used more than twenty-five aliases.
Sergeant Pat Postiglione of the Metro Nashville homicide unit worked the Bacot case for a year. He had blood at his scene and a fingerprint he believed belonged to the killer, and in 1991 there was no national system that would match either. So he called other cities asking whether anyone had something similar, and Cincinnati did. The two departments exchanged crime-scene photographs. Cincinnati had DNA; Nashville had blood; they matched.
That established that one man had done both. It did not give them a name. What did, by Postiglione's account, was the way the killer filled out motel registration cards, which read to him as Texan, so he sent the fingerprint to Dallas, and Dallas called back inside the hour with a name. Another account has the prints matched to the Cincinnati scene only after the arrest in Texas.
On the night of Friday, September 11, 1992, Magliolo was arrested for drunken driving in Jasper. Local officers contacted Nashville, and Postiglione and the Cincinnati detectives flew down the next morning. "We've gotten a lot of information about not only the Nashville homicide, but confirmed the Cincinnati homicide and confirmed a Louisiana homicide and possibly several others," Sergeant Robert Moore of the Metro murder squad told the Tennessean from Jasper that night. In the interview Magliolo admitted the Nashville killing, confirmed the Cincinnati one, and admitted a third, a man he said he had murdered in Louisiana. He was never charged with that one, and the man has never been publicly named, so a killing Magliolo admits has left no victim on the record.
He was brought back to Nashville, where the Tennessean expected him to be arraigned on the Monday, September 14, 1992, and was sentenced to life imprisonment plus fifty years for the rape and murder of Donna Bacot. Some summaries give September 14, 1992, as the date of that sentence, which would have been three days after his arrest; others place it in 1993. In Ohio in 1993 he was sentenced to fifteen years to life for the murder of Ida Mae Bladen. He was placed on the Tennessee Sex Offender Registry.
He told investigators he had killed more than ten people and named none of them. He later told reporters the figure was twelve, and it is not known whether that included the three already accounted for. A sergeant involved in the case called him a "switch hitter," because he had killed both women and men, and said he had revealed details "that only the perpetrator of the crime would have known." He is believed to have been active from 1977, which would make him seventeen at the start, and he is also suspected of killing his own half-brother. No further charge has been brought, and Postiglione has said publicly that he thinks there are more.